Spring Break Genealogy Webinars 9-12 March

The first full week of March is Spring Break here and we’ve decided to take advantage of the opportunity and roll out a series of webinar presentations. All attendance is done virtually–you just have to be at your computer. Those who cannot attend live will receive complimentary copies of the presentation. Handout included. Join us!

Enrollment is limited. Registration deadline is 8:00 am central time on 5 March 2016.

Have you considered what will happen to your genealogical material when you have gone to meet your ancestors? Preserving your information is more than simply putting a clause in your will and telling your kids to “keep it” or “give it to the library.” We will talk about donation concerns, preserving bits and pieces instead of one big chunk, and more.

Learn how to get more out of pre-1850 United States census records than tallies and hash marks. Through a series of several examples, we will see how to construct a probable household structure from these enumerations that only enumerate by name the heads of household. You won’t be ignoring pre-1850 censuses after our presentation.

Searching online databases is more than simply putting a name in query box and hoping. In this presentation we will see how to determine a search’s structure and how to create effective searches in such a way that repeatedly searching for similar things is avoided. If you spend more than a couple of minutes searching for a person in a database, it’s time to stop and think about how to organize your search of that database. This presentation will help you to do that.

FamilySearch has thousands of online databases that genealogists can use. Some have images and some do not. Some are fully indexed and some are not. Sometimes it’s best to search all their databases at once and sometimes it’s best to break your search down into specific regions or databases. After a general search procedure overview, we look at several representative examples from a variety of time periods and locations.

Solving genealogical problems requires applying some organization and methodology to the search process—not just searching willy-nilly to see what can be found. We will look at an overview of one problem-solving approach (more than just what’s on the illustration) that helps to focus the researcher on any genealogical problem and the various components of that process. Then will we see the process applied to several problems. We’re not guaranteeing to solve all your problems, but to give you ideas to help you direct your search.